Changes in the telecommunications market since the 1996 Telecommunications Act passed have pushed carriers far beyond their original core business of providing basic connectivity. Technological advancements and customer demands have compelled telephone companies and Internet service providers to provide communication “solutions” rather than just a dial tone. As such, service providers are always on the lookout for that next “killer” suite or creative service that will increase customer loyalty and create new revenue streams.
But carriers are faced with a problem. Today's legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN), while reliable and robust, is built on hardware-based circuit switches that leave little room for innovation and service differentiation. Many carriers are solving this problem by migrating networks to IP-based technology, but they may still have huge investments in the PSTN hardware that are not fully depreciated. This means that as network migration continues, a hybrid PSTN/IP environment will emerge, with traffic being directed across both the PSTN and IP systems.
One issue that will need to be addressed in both the IP and hybrid PSTN/IP telephony environments is how customers will be provided with multimedia features and supplementary services, such as call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, call transfer, call conferencing, call hold, speed calling, and the like. In the traditional PSTN environment, service providers (i.e., the carriers) rely on network-centric devices to provide such multimedia features and supplementary services to the users. Customers can obtain these services by either subscribing or paying per usage. Because it is the network-centric devices, not the end device (e.g., the phone in the customer premises), that provide these features and services, service providers can easily control whether they should be provided per user basis based on the subscription status. This capability of screening the service delivery makes the service charging possible.
When IP-based telephony technology, such as SIP, emerges, many end devices may be able to provide the multimedia features and supplementary services without permission from the network-centric devices of the service providers. As a result, the capability of controlling the feature/service delivery from these network-centric devices may also be deteriorated. Under this scenario, service providers will likely be able to only enable uniform multimedia features and supplementary services for all of its customer's end devices or rely on static provisioning for each such end device to enable/disable certain unwanted features/services.
Uniform feature delivery is neither desirable to service providers nor flexible to the customers. For example, in the Centrex environment, the customer (e.g., business user) may not want those Centrex phones dedicated to guest usage to have the same sets of capability as those used by its employees. On the other hand, static provisioning of each phone separately requires high management and maintenance efforts, and also does not meet the requirement of delivering the features on a per user account basis (i.e., such provisioning is delivered on a per end device basis).
Accordingly, service providers want a mechanism of better controlling the multimedia features and supplementary services delivery from the network core, even though these multimedia features and supplementary services are actually provided by the end devices that reside in the end user premises. The present invention defines an architecture and mechanism for network core devices (e.g., SIP servers) to control end devices (e.g., SIP phones) to deliver the multimedia features and supplementary services dynamically and based on per user account profiles. With the architecture and mechanism of the present invention, service providers can selectively provide these services to proper groups of users by indicating such feature/service information in the communication packets (e.g., SIP messages). The end devices used with the present invention will also provide multimedia features and supplementary services only as directed in such communication packets. Consequently, service providers will regain network-concentric control over the multimedia features and supplementary services that they provide in an IP or hybrid PSTN/IP telephony system.